Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Naturally Samuel Northcliffe came. He both escorted my mother and acted as best man. At the church in Reigate he stood rigidly next to me as we eyeballed the pained wooden Christ-figure nailed up over the altar. When I glanced down during the service, I saw that his left hand — as large and inert as a wheel of Gouda cheese — was casually arranged so as to ward off the evil eye from the approximate region of his testicles.

I didn't invite Gyggle — that would have been pushing it. Although Jane had never followed through with her voluntary work at the Lurie Foundation Hospital — her assessment having concluded in exactly the way he suspected it would — she'd have recalled him immediately. He's not the sort of man who blends into a crowd, however large and jolly it may be. I felt, quite reasonably, that Jane might be a little disturbed to discover exactly how it was that our particular affinity had been elected.

Jane was a beautiful bride, radiant in a cream satin dress she had helped to sew herself. At the end of the service when she lifted up her veil so that I could kiss her, I was struck anew by the absolutely trusting and direct expression on her face.

She was very excited — almost over-excited. It was a sunny enough day for it and the guests spread out from the marquee mingling on the dappled lawn; small children pissed in the pampas grass and tipsy elderly aunts either laughed or cried, as the spirit moved them.

The speeches were better than average. Jane's father, who was a stockbroker in the City before he retired, had made the classics his hobby, consequently his text was littered with clever literary allusions and poetical tropes. It went down very well, as did Samuel Northcliffe's.

If Jane's parents had had any doubts about their daughter marrying me — and I know for a fact that they did, they were as snobbish as any of the English and despite my mother's impeccable breeding, had hoped for a better match for their daughter than an hereditary marketing man — they were dispelled by the information that my guardian was Mr Samuel Northcliffe.

It must have been about the third or fourth time Jane took me back to her parents’ house for dinner when this came out.

‘Northcliffe, you say? Hmm.’ Mr Carter was prodding the unseasonable fire in the grate as he spoke, a sherry glass dangling from his signet-ringed hand. ‘I knew him slightly when I was in the City, he's prominent in a Lloyd's syndicate that I had connections with — a rather imposing man, isn't he?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘he can be a little overbearing, although he doesn't mean to be.’

‘And you say he was a friend of your father's?’

‘I believe so. They met when my father ran a marketing agency in the sixties.’

‘Of course, of course. And after your parents were separated he took an interest in your education?’

‘Oh very much so, in fact, I'd say I pretty much owe where I am today to him.’

‘Really, really.’ He dabbled some more with the poker while Jane and I exchanged the conspiratorial glances of lovers on the sofa.

When he finally showed up at the wedding, I could tell that my father-in-law-soon-to-be and his old City cronies were overawed by him. He was looking his chic best, immaculately attired in a sweeping swallow-tailed cut-away, a black cravat secured with a emerald stick pin, canary-yellow silk waistcoat, spongebag trousers and huge leather shoes complete with white spats fastened with mother-of-pearl buttons. My mother was on his arm and she too smart and elegant, having for so long been burnished by association.

I had been petrified about his speech but in the event the Procrustes of Piffle didn't let me down by waffling on for too long. Instead he spoke succinctly, standing erect, his shiny top hat still clamped on the belvedere of his head. He made a couple of good cracks about the institution of marriage, implied that I was a steady and reliable — although not too bright — sort of fellow, then sat down to applause that was all the more heartfelt because he had kept it to under five minutes.

After our honeymoon we moved to a house I had rented off the Edgware Road. It was a bit of a way from town but it wasn't intended to be our permanent residence. Jane scaled down her work. Her television series having ended while we were engaged, she kept on with a number of handicraft part works she did stuff for and used her free time to find somewhere nice for us to live. Meanwhile I carried on with my work at D.F. & L. Associates, struggling to figure a way out of the situation I had got myself into.

It could be argued that I should never have married Jane knowing what I did about myself. The trouble was, though, I wasn't exactly sure what that truth was.

After my last trip to the Land of Children's Jokes and The Fat Controller's retroscendent revelations of my murderous activities, the ‘little outrages’, I had become an effectively divided personality. It was a matter of conscious will. If I chose to be so I was his entirely. The events of my formerly fearful life were delightfully different from this perspective. It was I who had made all the running in our relationship, I who had persuaded him to intitiate me into the darker arts, I who had seized upon the poisoned umbrella when he offered it to me at the Theatre Royal, so deperate was I to prove that I could be worthy of his interest in me.

And later, I had happily joined him in mesmerising, drugging and then sexually assaulting poor June in my caravan. There was no mystery now as to why she could never bear to talk to me again. Despite being unconscious throughout, some ghostly memory of the experience must have stayed with her.

Once I reached London and its teeming anonymity, my activities blossomed. Not a week went by for over five years when I didn't commit some sort of an outrage. Murders, torturings, baby snatchings, assaults, pointless acts of blackmail, I turned my hand to anything. Under The Fat Controller's exacting tutelage I had developed an unnatural strength which I was able to deploy to such good effect when dispatching Bob Pinner for his suit and torturing Fucker Finch's pit bull. Nevertheless these acts were mere persiflage when compared to my better-scripted scenarios.

The outrage I was most proud of was when I tore the time-buffeted head off the old tramp in the Tube and then addressed myself sexually to his severed neck. Remember that? The train had stalled in the tunnel, half-way between Golders Green and Hampstead. I found myself alone in the carriage save for this dosser, who was sleeping off a dousing of some port wine or cooking sherry. It was just a little idea but the real fun of it was whether I could take my bow before we pulled in at Hampstead. I could.

Another champion bit of fun had involved following an elderly lady home. I conned my way into her flat, spinning her the line that the local librarian had told me that she had a book I desperately needed, something I had to read for my conscientious, socially useful work.

‘I've only got the large print edition, dear,’ she said. ‘I've such bad myopia that it's the only one I can manage.’

‘That's all right,’ I had replied, sipping the cup of tea she offered me. Then, once she had fetched it from the bedroom, I calmly and casually beat her to death with it. Ha! No wonder I always had a sense of being in the now, of a kind of alienation from history itself.

The greatest and sickest irony of my divided life was that if I acknowledged that it was I who had done these things, I was free from all remorse. Instead, like my mentor, I held myself to be beyond all morality, a towering superman whose activities could not even be observed from the grovelling positions of mere mortals, let alone judged. Yet it also remained perfectly plausible for me to deny that I had done any of these awful things at all. Most of the outrages had been committed during little odds and sods of borrowed time, they were will o’ the wisp happenings, scraps of the Holocaust, left-overs from the Gulag. Although I had liked to torture my victims, I seldom indulged in so long a session as I had with the pit bull. Usually I would call it a wrap, after a leisurely hour or so of soldering flesh, pulling nails and shooting up strychnine.